Mothers and Daughters and the Origins of Female Subjectivity

Jane Van Buren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317724278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Mothers and Daughters and the Origins of Female Subjectivity challenges the theory of the Oedipus complex, which permeates psychoanalytic theory, psychology, semiotics and cultural studies. The book focuses on the re-examination of women's development through the theories of primitive mental states.

Women's subjectivity has been profoundly limited by continuing anxieties about the mother's body. Jane Van Buren describes how women are gradually escaping the curse of inferiority and finding a voice, enabling the mother to provide their daughters with a legacy of rightful agency over their bodies and minds. Drawing on the theories of Klein, Bion and Winnicott, and incorporating recent developments in psychobiology, this book provides a novel approach to subjects including the dreams, myths and phantasies of individuals, the nature of mother and daughter relationships, sexuality, pregnancy, menstruation and the idea of the mother's body as problematic and dangerous.

This interdisciplinary investigation into curtailed female subjectivity and its many ramifications in society, culture and individual mental growth will be of great interest to all practising psychoanalysts, and those studyingpsychoanalytic theory and gender studies.

Chapter 1

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Silences from the deep

Women's subjectivity and the voice of the turtle

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The concept of a woman subject is barely known to us yet another century has ended. This concept as a realization has been buried, encrypted, split, disguised, distorted and aborted through centuries of symbolic culture. Subjectivity is itself a newly emphasized concept that has grown alongside interest in the functioning of signification and its relationship to psychoanalysis (Freud, 1900; Lacan, 1977a). The former emphasizes the significance of language and symbols as colored and constructed through compromise formations between the ego and the drives; the latter proposes that the power of desire and the impact of loss or the awareness of “two-ness” are powerful forces that create signification structures (Grotstein, 1990a; Kennedy, 1997; Lacan, 1977a; Tustin, 1981b). Jacques Lacan also emphasizes the gap in which to signify, the space in which substitution and combination take place. From these realizations the notion of the subject of speech, with the capacity to transform desire into symbols and signs is acknowledged. The subject, with capacities for signification and ultimately thought, include a reasonable receptivity to unconscious themes and desires, and a porous membrane between unconscious and conscious messages. Bion has designated the latter as made up of alpha elements stemming from dream work processes. The contact barrier, as he named it, allows a discourse between unconscious/conscious elements enabling the subject to dream and remember (Bion, 1965, 1992). As we shall see, the dream work not only is dedicated to taming wilder messages from the infinite but also helps the mind of the dreamer to take small doses of potential vastness. Bion understands the messages from the deep to carry intense disturbance but slips out the constraints of economic forces and rides with the belief in powerful meanings.

From Bion and Matte Blanco we are able to comprehend that dream work alpha transforms primal chaos into readable messages, but that it is also the instrument for harvesting elements from the infinite deep of our other side – the symmetrical unconscious, where all the meanings of all time reside waiting to potentate into little births. Freud came close to mapping these processes in his theory of the dream work in which the subject creates a dream narrative that grows out of elements of both symmetrical and asymmetrical logic (Matte Blanco, 1988). But Freud, as we know, thought from the perspective of drive theory. He believed that the ego, at first designated as secondary process, needed to check the fulminating drives, and transform their antisocial quest for gratification into sublimation, that brought acceptable compromise solutions between the pleasure and unpleasure principles.

Freud's dream work theory, however, also contained the blueprint of the path of burgeoning subjectivity. Freud's (1913) work on the Oedipus myth in Totem and Taboo, built upon archaic anxieties, and displayed their transformation through displacement and condensation. His understanding that myth and dream explained and illuminated important semiotic processes was crucial. However, the ways in which Freud justifies the death instinct are devoted to justifying his theory to the scientific community. Freud, like Klein and Lacan, responded to the mythification of the fear of death which Klein called “annihilation anxiety,” and Lacan, “the awareness of lack and alienation.” Freud builds his concepts of the death instinct around the nirvana principle. Each theorist had their own way of understanding phenomena that overwhelms the organism with stimuli and is felt to be a threat to life or are unbearably painful. Today we might think of these phenomena as the failure of alpha function. The version that is constructed is a heavily autochthonous reading by the subject as to what has occurred, or what is happening now, or will always be repeated. Grotstein has written on the importance of autochthony as the infant's or patient's self-created stream of myths and narratives functioning to ward off an awareness of helplessness, and to find agency in creating their world (Grotstein, 1998, 2000a). These proliferating signs are available to be presented and employed by language and conscious thought within the symbolic order.

We need to remember that human speech and literacy evolved only a few thousand years ago. In Shlain's book, The Goddess Versus the Alphabet (1998), he makes the case that until the left brain developed, offering dual hemispheric functioning, literacy and abstract symbolic functioning were only potential. One might say the pull to speak and write connected with a more settled agricultural culture stimulated the development of the left hemisphere. Thus, we cannot read the earliest messages from the history of marks left by human culture. We would need to be in the exchange itself, to feel the heat of the emotions as we do in the session when words fail, or are not able to carry the innermost affects. Shlain (1998) believed that the right brain contributions suffered a loss of prestige at the advent of left brain functioning. Today, in psychoanalysis, we are challenged to find a helpful balance between the two. In any event, signs and symbols developed slowly and were found at first in tools and objects for daily living. These concrete signs appear only as recently as 30,000 BC. A critical shift may be seen in the images placed on the walls of the French caves. These images left behind by the people of that era provide us with signs through which we can read about their civilization and daily life. The images of wild animals signify the literal and figurative aspects of their existence and the anxieties of survival. They also reveal some reflective capacity on the part of the painters about their situations and feelings. The images inside the caves suggest the beginnings of some signs of inner reflection and the projection of this mental activity outside the mind for communication purposes and further reflection.

Out of this change in brain functioning arose a profound psychological and social shift. Shlain explains that the dominance of patriarchal culture over matriarchal culture came about not because of the northern hunters invasion of the southern matriarchal cultures, but from a shift inside. The right brain sphere of mental functioning associated with mother-infant communication, and deep emotional experience, was sacrificed to the needs of left brain tasks; such as attention to the domain of symbols placed in orderly structures that themselves obeyed laws of time and space. Non-linear dreams and mythic structures were counterpoised to linear conscious apprehension. The different sides of mental life affect each other profoundly, and cannot be split away from each other without distortion of experience.

Similarly, the ability to reflect on one's mental experience and the concepts of inside are not clearly represented. The boundaries that delineate a sense of self, and not self, were not reflected in cultural artifacts largely until the Renaissance in Western Europe. You may recall the two dimensional renderings of human and religious figures of the medieval period. Similarly, landscapes were not yet presented as a subject of human interest. The human gaze focused heavenward until the outdoor scenes of nature appeared in the new space of perspective.

Also, we are accustomed to contemplating the emergence of individualism as an integral part of the awareness of internal mental life or subjectivity. This approach rests on the idea that the inner life of the individual is lost in the group or clan, or never develops out of enfoldment into the group mentality. In addition, hierarchical or authoritarian societies are known to mitigate against individual thought, as they are directed by the thoughts of the leader or elite group.

A fascinating possibility comes to mind! The new realizations made possible a sense of inside and outside that was mediated by perception and percepts. Perception is shaped by the inner eye and brings forward the artifacts of dream, myth, and phantasy. Percepts are the images formed through the physical eye. Intriguingly, we know that the two kinds of seeing, one more subjective and projective, and the other, more dominated by facts and external reality, mingle and blur the edges of subjective and objective. We must add that the very notion of reality has been severely challenged as has empiricism and scientism. Similarly, the notion of truths that can be found and used as guides for living the virtuous, worthwhile life, have been deconstructed unmercifully, particularly in the latter part of the twentieth century.

At the same time, the development of increasingly symbolic means of expression has seen a profound imbalance between the marks of men and those of women. In many instances, culture outwardly seems to be exclusively chiseled by men. Schlain's hypothesis is that as the alphabet and literacy developed, the left brain began to dominate.

An articulated antagonism between male and female culture is seen in the repeated death of matriarchal cultures, overthrown by male dominated hunting groups, in which women's marks disappeared underneath male dominated culture (Campbell, 1976). Women, denied self-expression and the authority to create significance in permanent public marks, enunciated in oral modes within the childrearing and domestic culture. Mothers in particular spoke to their children not only in words but also through the languages expressed from one unconscious to another. Thus, rituals, customs and myths are laced with women's unconscious overtly silenced feelings and thoughts. As we pursue the roots of these bifurcations, we shall plunge into the depths of women's internal reality and attempt to make contact with lost, encrypted and sacrificed aspects entombed there.

In keeping with these splits, men enunciated in discourses that assigned natural and biological causes to the concepts of sexual difference. The attempted burial of matriarchal culture, and the dominance of patriarchal culture, were justified by arguments about women's special capacities, defined by her childbearing, child-raising functions, and limited mental capacities. It was inevitable that both Freud and Lacan constructed and interpreted the nature of the symbolic order, along these lines. Despite their superb efforts at piercing the origins in which meaning and value are constructed by internal forces and social responses, they continued to split apart aspects of human experience. The signifies that carried the utmost anxieties are designated (M) Other,¹ and influence the placement of women outside the symbolic order, as well as the failure to recognize female mental capacities as potent and equal.

Freud and Lacan were ensnared within the gender concepts of their time and place, not only because they themselves spoke their “mother tongue,” but also by the same psychic forces that influenced the interpretation of male and female gender in binary oppositional terms; superior/inferior, known/strange, passive/active, culture/nature, sun/moon, which remained powerfully alive in language and culture.

Hélène Cixous describes the structure of binary opposition as a metaphor, which carries through all our discourse:

Always the same metaphor: we follow it, it transports us, in all of its forms, wherever a discourse is organized. The same thread, or double tress leads us, whether we are reading or speaking through literature, philosophy, criticism, centuries of representation of reflection.

(Cixous and Clément, 1975: 63)

She continues:

Men and women are caught up in a network of millennial cultural determinations of a complexity that is practically unanalyzable. We can no more talk about “woman” than about “man” without getting caught up in an ideological theater, where the multiplications of representations, images, reflections, myths, and identifications, constantly transform, deform and alter each person's imaginary, and in advance, renders all conceptualizations, null and void.

(Cixous and Clément, 1975: 83)

Freud and Lacan were ensnared in a discourse that arose out of a great paradox that itself contained a labyrinthine knot. Within their explanations of sexual difference, cultural belief, and practice, they proposed that women's capacities for thought and symbolization were less than those of men. Though Freud and Lacan differed in their concept of the symbolic order and sexual difference, both were seriously impacted in their views by the notion of castration. I propose that the emphasis on the phallus as present, and masking the fear of lack, also produces the ritual of circumcision; of enduring a tiny loss, the tip of the penis, implemented as a metonymy that both eases terror and anxiety, and disavows the implied realizations of loss and finitude (Lacan, 1977a).

Among these are fear of mortality, loss, lack of connection to the Godhead and impotence or helplessness, or the quest for omnipotence regained, the latter usually signified by patricide or domination of mother's powers.

The paradoxical knot that maintains the concept of sexual difference, as based on the inferior capacities of women to symbolize is a manic defense against the realization that neither man nor woman is insulated from the uncertainty of postnatal existence. The female person is linked with the failure to attain symbolism and to forever remain unborn or in pieces; psyche subordinated to soma.

In this scheme, the phallus substitutes for the umbilicus. Thus, males are offered a safe tether in place of fusion privileging them to create the symbolic order. Within the legend of phallic privilege, the male person is given confidence in his power to think, speak and create, while women are designated as creatures of the body and the instincts. The escape from what I have named “the shadow of the phallus” remains difficult, and the mandate of phallic privilege maintains the inferiority of female symbolism. Girls and women are defined as those who do not “master” thought or speech.

More recently, the mythologies of gender emphasize the notion of the subject or development of the sense of “I”-ness. Freud's notions of the latter were replete with the idea that men/women were unseated from their center as persons of agency, and will, by the forces of the “it.” However, in the battles between the ego and the drives, men fared better in achieving capacities for speech and symbolism. In this reading of the Oedipus complex, the female person is at a disadvantage in the process of repressing Oedipal desires since she is already castrated. Her Superego remains flabby, her Oedipal desires not well resolved, she tends to mourn what is not there, and looks for the antidote to her sense of lack in father's phallus, husband's phallus and a baby.

Lacan's (1977b) essay on the “Significance of the phallus” deconstructs the concept of the phallus as a real biological entity, and reveals its semiotic function as a protection against engulfment by the mother. Lacan understands the phallus to be the signifier of signifies that structures space in the subject's mind, allowing for the development of symbolic functioning. The newly acquired boundaries, named as “The Law of the Father,” act as a barrier against the undertow of fusion. Lacan's Achilles heel is found in his use of language, particularly his designation of the onset of dual hemispheric functioning as brought about by the onset of Law of the Father; as if the infant and mother are always precariously perched on the edge of the well of fusion. Lacan is unclear here and leaves himself vulnerable to feminist criticism. Thus, Jane Gallop is able to say that the major fallacy in the phallocentric theory of psychic space is based on the physical presence, or absence of a piece of flesh, in place of attitudes and emotional states of mind (Gallop, 1982).

The best reading of Lacan's (1977b) essay and his theory about the implementation of the “Law of the Father” is justified through the theory of significance. Lacan understood the developing subject as discovering the yawning horror of lack or the void. The realization of separate existence from mother drives the infant subject or person to find substitutes for the other. The rationalization for phallocentrism takes the position that though woman/mother's body is the source of life and its provider, and the womb, the placenta, birth canal, vagina and breasts belong to mother's body, their power is overcome by the phallus. The potency of the female body and mind are greatly underestimated and represented by their opposites, lack of dependability, solidity and bounty. Thus, one can see the etiology of the many cultural rites in which women and girls are demeaned and denigrated, defined as inferior to men and destined for a subordinate life. The signifier of the phallus carries the truth of the struggle to bear realizations in which the veils of autochthony, phantasy and omnipotence are lifted (Bion, 1962a, 1962b; Grotstein, 2000a; Tustin, 1990; Winnicott, 1958).

Legends, myths and discourse over thousands of years of human culture reveal profound dread of female potency; in particular the insides of mother's body that are portrayed as both compelling and horrifying. As discussed the French prehistoric caves with their great drawings of animal life and hunting scenes suggest the profound association of survival with mother's insides, and the images of hunting and provision of animal food. As we know, children of both genders are stirred to both awe and hatred at the experience of the breast or extreme dependence, particularly if the experiences of helplessness are stimulated by premature awareness of psychic birth (Bion, 1962a, 1962b; Grotstein, 1998; Meltzer, 1988, 1992; Paul, 1997; Tustin, 1981b).

Several themes come to mind in the context of the cave art. The concepts of bonding and feeding stand out. The human infant phantasizes a privileged return to the blessed safety of the internal spaces of mother's body as a flight from anxiety and pain. In the robust infant's mind, the internal voyage is playful and temporary, but in the case of the disturbed or vulnerable infant, the journey to the inside of mother's body is felt as a fusion state and become more a prison than a refuge (Grotstein, 1990a; Joseph, 1975; Klein, 1957; Mason, 1981; Meltzer, 1992; Steiner, 1993a; Tustin, 1990).

The more intense and desperate are the feelings of disconnection in the infant, the more it is felt that the maternal insides are entrapping and malicious and/or the more the sense of survival is undermined. All channels of feeding and caves of safety are laced with persecutory images and later on with guilt (Klein, 1952). The cave paintings provide a semiotic framework for the negative and positive poles of the infant's transference to mother's postnatal presence. The cave paintings suggest the creation of a chain of signifies that may tell the presence of bounty, and a balanced relationship with the cave mother, who provides for the helpless babe; or the cave paintings may suggest the tensions with the real predators as well as anguished rage at living through vulnerability, intensifying phantasies of possession, and plunder of maternal bounty and potency.

The concept of lack, and the threat of the ultimate void, in the sense of the experience of abjection and failure to find meaning, gives rise to language in the deepest emotional ways (Grotstein, 1990a, 1990b; Kristeva, 1982; Sullivan, 1991). Lacan interprets the significance of the cave paintings as placing a circle of meaning around the void. He is referring to anamorphous, a distortion in representation which expresses something beyond the literal meaning; in other words, not mimesis, but establishing meaning to fill the void of the unknown. In this case, more than physical subsistence, but the effort at using language for the demarcation and limitation of the void (Sullivan, 1991). The cave art may also sign the myth of the labyrinth, the caves themselves representing mother's body – the paintings the images of life, which are felt to dwell inside the caverns of mother's body. In psychoanalytic interpretations of the myth of the labyrinth, the infant wishes to explore or repossess mother's insides in order to regain security of attachment, to discover the origins of life, to possess the contents, and prevent the other babies or daddy's penis from stealing mother away, and to rehearse the Odyssey of finding one's destiny by overcoming the obstacles to fear, and dread of psychic responsibility. In this way, the labyrinth may be seen as a metaphor for the map of the pathways that lead to the capacity to take on the responsibility of subjectivity (Grots...